


Erica and the Three Humans

by puppyfacedbrokenboys



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Future, Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 01:48:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puppyfacedbrokenboys/pseuds/puppyfacedbrokenboys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A robot named Erica with a talking internal computer named Stiles crash land on Earth and check out the house of the three humans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Erica and the Three Humans

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for my Science Fiction class. We were assigned to take a fairy tale and make a science fiction adaption. I used Teen Wolf names, so I might as well post it here. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> Oh, and the fairy tale is Goldilocks and the Three Bears... in case you didn't get that already, lol.

She could not believe it. She was the best pilot back on her home planet and she had made such a rookie mistake. Erica had run out of fuel in her rocket.

She would not have, surely, if she had followed her hard-wired brain and decided to stop at the closest planet and not continue on to the beautiful green and blue sphere that suspended in the air in such a welcoming way. She had never heard of the planet before; had never seen such beauty before, and something in her pushed her on and told her that she could make it.

So she went, put her rocket into gear and pressed the button that would blast-power her towards the sphere. She was so close. She should have made it safely. But right before she hit the atmosphere, her rocket died and started to drop, even in the weightlessness of space.

Luckily, the sphere's atmosphere had a sort of magnetic pull, and before she sunk too far it sucked her in with such force that she felt the heat of it around her rocket. Soon she was falling, falling, falling, and spinning so fast she felt as if her head would fall off.

Almost as fast as the falling and spinning began, it stopped as she hit the ground with a loud crunch. The hatch to the rocket popped open and she was flung out of it to land in a heap next to a brick wall. The force of the launch made her land awkwardly on her leg, the metal of the cylinder hanging precariously off the step of the porch. Wires could be seen sticking out, and with a sigh and a roll of her eyes, Erica was quick to pop the bottom of her left leg back into place, her leg twitching instantly to reinforce the automatic fusion to heal the broken part.

When Erica was sure that her leg wouldn't just pop right back off from her weight (she was a very clumsy robot and was used to breaking off random pieces of her anatomy), she pushed herself off the porch and onto her feet to survey her crash site.

A heap of smoking metal could be seen on the lush green that stretched across the clearing (something that Erica had never encountered before). Her rocket was literally destroyed, much to Erica's fear, so with a sigh she spun her torso around in a complete circle. A blur caught her vision, but she couldn't stop mid-arc. She flung her torso in another arc and stopped when the blur that she had seen on the first pass had focused in her line of vision. Her bottom half spun around on the little wheels on her feet to realign itself with her upper half.

"What's this?" she asked, seemingly to the open air around her.

"It seems to be a house, Erica," she heard in her ear. The mechanical voice made her sigh in relief. She thought she had lost him in this strange place.

"It's made out of… brick, Stiles," Erica answered the voice. "Why not metal?"

Stiles was what she had named her personalized internal computer. Well, to be honest, he had selected it out of the list of names she had given him, because there was no way she was going to call him by his scientific name that was longer than the wiring that ran through her body. The other choices were Jarvis, Derek, and Blaine. Stiles had been the winner.

Stiles was always there, her best friend, and she always wished that he didn't just live within her. When she was in an unknown place, she always had the security of his presence, buzzing in the back of her head. She was never scared because she was never alone. He was, essentially, an all-knowing database that was built into every robot back home, but he did have a sarcastic streak that had led to her turning him off for about three days straight more than once.

"Metal is not the ideal material for a home here, Erica," Stiles continued. "Not when fire is an element that is still used widely across Earth. The creatures that inhabit this planet have soft flesh, not metal like you. Metal doesn't breathe, as you know. Instant human barbeque, yum."

Erica felt a laugh rumble softly in her chest as she nodded unnecessarily since he couldn't see the action, but it was habit. "Welp, let's check it out, shall we? I know you're dying to suck up all the knowledge in this place." She heard an answering purr in the back of her mind and knew she was right.

Stiles' database tendencies made him almost ache to know everything about everything. Many a time Erica had had to listen to Stiles drone on and on about something as uninteresting as how a microwave they had found in a junkyard worked. And then there was that incident with the powder blue jeep they had found, circa 1985. Stiles had begged her to take it, even though it was about a thousand years old and needed a ton of work.

If a database could fall in love, the way that Stiles acted whenever they were in the jeep was as close as he was ever going to get to falling head-over-heels. It was one of those times where she wished Stiles lived freely from her, but she dealt with it.

Stiles sucked his knowledge from things through touch. In order to do that, Erica had to touch the things. It was a tedious thing at times, especially when he was begging her to touch things that she did not want to. Once they had finally gotten the jeep out of the junkyard, Stiles had Erica run her hands over every inch of that thing that she could reach. It took about three hours, but Stiles was weirdly content afterwards and had gone quiet for the rest of the day, only the occasional humming in the back of her mind that signaled his ever-constant presence could be heard.

Right now was no exception. As Erica finally approached the two story farm house (as Stiles had informed her), she automatically began to run her hand over any surface she could reach. It still bored her, the act still feeling like a nuisance, but she could zone it out much more effectively now. As her hands did their work, her eyes began to catalogue everything in her sight. Her right palm found the brass of the doorknob and she twisted her hand slightly, and soon the door was creaking open.

What greeted her was a vast and open foyer with a white stairway sweeping up to the second floor.

"Left or right, Sty?" she questioned. His excitement was a slight annoyance in her ear, but she was happy that he was just as excited as her. This world was so new to them both. There was so much to explore. It was so quiet and still, so much different than the constant motion of her home.

"Left… seems to be a kitchen. Where they make their food," Stiles answered. "Making your own food; how inconvenient." Back on their home planet Erica just had to think about what she wanted to eat and then shake a spray can. Press down on the nozzle and— _poof_ —food!

Erica rolled into the room, her hand running along the walls and over the counters of their own accord. Her fingers then brushed over the various metal appliances, things she had only seen in passing on pages of history screens. Stiles ate everything up, his coos gaining in volume as she passed over them all in turn. When she spun towards the counter in the center, she stopped, cocking her head to the side.

"Is that what I think those boxes are?" Erica questioned and Stiles made an affirmative sound.

"Yes. Those are Raisin Brand, Corn Flakes, and Reese's Puffs. Cereal, the food of breakfast for a child, as well as one of the major food items consumed by a bachelor and the wild species that is a college stu—Erica, what are you doing?" Stiles trailed off as Erica moved forward to grab all three boxes in her arms and deposited them quickly on the table.

"I'm gonna try some, is that a problem?" Erica too had a sarcastic streak.

Stiles made a noise that seemed as if he was shaking his head. "No, by all means, carry on. It's part of science, right? Experiment away." Stiles sounded excited to hear her thoughts of the cereal, but also disappointed that he couldn't try some himself.

"They eat them in a bowl full of milk, and with a spoon, in case you didn't know," he offered when Erica had just stood in place, staring at the three boxes with no clue as to what to do.

"Oh, right," she said as she flung around. She stopped again, and Stiles told her where everything was. After opening and banging closed a few cupboards to find a bowl, Erica returned to the table and began her experiment.

She poured some Corn Flakes into the first bowl, followed by some milk. She took a bite, chewed, then made a displeased noise as she pushed the bowl away. "This one's too bland," she announced.

She repeated the action with the second bowl, this time with the Raisin Brand. "This one's… not good either. It's better than the Corn Flakes, but these black things are horrid," she said.

She poured the third cereal, the Reese's Puffs, into the bowl a bit more slowly. She was bracing herself for what she would taste. She took up the spoonful in her hand and raised it to her lips. "Bottom's up," she said, thinking back to some old sitcom she had watched back home where a guy had said it before stuffing his face with food that he was wary of. Her lips closed upon the metal, and she slowly pulled it out so that she could chew.

And chew she did and she was so quiet that Stiles prompted, "So?"

Erica swallowed and a smile graced her silver face. "This is so good. I really wish you could try it!" Then she poured a little more into her bowl and ate it happily, thinking that these humans may just have some taste after all.

When she was finished, she stood, patting her torso absently with a soft clank of metal on metal. "Where to now?"

"Hmm… let's go to the room to the right. I can sense some pulsing energy that I really want to meet," Stiles said giddily. Erica rolled her eyes and followed his directions, rolling herself into a bigger room than the foyer that held two large chairs, a large couch, and a table in the center. The color scheme was green, brown, and black, the colors evenly spread out among all of the furniture pieces. As her hand ran along the wall, Erica looked up to see a huge screen that hung from the wall.

"Ooh, this screen is pulsing so much energy, I don't know how it doesn't combust on itself," Stiles was saying as she studied the screen.

"It's so… small, though. Our screens back home take up this entire wall and then some. How can they deal?" She walked forward, running her hands lightly over the edges of the fifty-four inch television screen. "How does this even stay on the wall?"

"It's lighter than it looks, Erica… and the walls are strong," Stiles replies, and then goes on to explain that in this world, these screens are very expensive to acquire, as well as the mechanics of how the screen is suspended from the wall. Erica, for once, listens intently because she really couldn't believe it. She was so wrapped up in listening that she hadn't noticed she had moved until she was falling backward to land on...

"Ow! What did I land on, a rock?" she exclaimed as her back-end landed on what seemed to be a chair as she looked down at it. "This chair is too hard. Who in their right mind would own this?"

"People seem to have bad posture on this planet," Stiles said in his informative voice. "Maybe if they weren't so soft they wouldn't have that pesky problem."

Erica ignored him and moved on to the couch next to the chair. It seemed to be made of leather. "Seems promising," she muttered as she flounced upon the couch. It was soft, but before long she was sliding on the slippery surface. "Nope, this won't do." She stood up and made her way to the last chair in the room. She sat down slowly, and sunk in just slightly into the seat.

"Mmm, this is nice." Her hands ran over the soft green material and her fingers brushed over a screen in the arm.

Suddenly, the room was flooded with light and sound and Erica whipped her head towards the flat-screen, which was now on. Well, that was cool… and that was the closest thing on this planet that matched the technology of her own home, so far.

"Ooh, a concert!" Stiles exclaimed. "I've missed real instruments." A wicked guitar solo ripped through the speakers, followed by a massive drum one.

"Yeah, cool, now help me turn it down before my ear sockets crack," she complained. Stiles commanded that she walk over to the television in order for him to override the controls. With a touch, the sound was lowered to a bearable volume. Erica returned to sitting in the chair, curling up as the two continued to watch the concert unfold. Erica had no clue who the band was, did not even care really, and just relaxed fully for the first time since she had crash-landed.

Not before long, the concert ended and Stiles was chirping in her ear that she needed to get up so that they could explore the second floor. Erica shrugged, having nothing else better to do. She didn't want to leave the comfort of the chair, but she knew that Stiles wouldn't shush until he had sucked up everything he could in this house.

So the two—well, Erica, really—ascended the stairs at a leisurely pace, letting Stiles chatter on about anything that he had found from the glides of her wandering fingers. Erica made tiny sounds here and there to make it seem as if she was listening. Her mind was wandering, taking in the peaceful air of the house. Then a scent caught her nose and she felt herself gravitating towards it.

She came upon a door that was cracked open, and she peered in to see what seemed to be a bedroom. She pushed open the door and was washed over by the scent in a more direct way. Sitting on the dresser was a bowl full of what looked to be chips of wood and leaves. She walked towards it and peered into the bowl, taking an inhale of the sweet smell. She ran her fingers into the bowl, shuffling the wood and leaves inside.

"Potpourri. An air freshener."

"Smells like…" Erica paused to take another inhale, letting the smell settle within her. "Vanilla and… cherry." She sank into the mattress beside her, not wanting to leave the comforting scent. But, as she made contact with the mattress, she immediately felt as if she was sinking and going to be eaten as the mattress seemed to suck her in like quick-sand. "What—Stiles, it's gonna eat me!" she exclaimed, flailing.

Her fingers must have brushed the surface because Stiles was explaining, "It's memory foam. It shapes into the contours of your body. It's not going to eat you, so stop flailing."

"Easy for you to say," she muttered as she rolled herself up from the mattress. Her flailing had knocked her backwards and even more into the clutches of the evil mattress. "It may not eat me, but I'm sure it's gonna suck my life-force out. Let's get out of here."

She ran from the room as fast as she could and ended up in another room in the middle of the hall, across from what looked to be a bathroom, if the tub was any indicator. She immediate sat down on the tiny bed in the middle of the room and was greeted with a loud squeak. She shifted her weight and was rewarded with the sound of the rustling of plastic.

"Must belong to a young kid. Boy from the looks of the room," Stiles said. Erica took a survey of the room and took in the blue wallpaper and the cars that scattered the floor. "Probably has the plastic because he's a bed-wetter," Stiles continued amusedly.

At that, Erica jumped up with a squeak of horror. " _Bed-wetter_? You mean the creatures here actually _pee_ in their beds? _Gross_!"

Stiles chuckled, and if Erica could have seen him he'd probably be doubled over and shaking his head. "Not generally, no. Just the ones that are young and have a problem with potty-training."

"Oh," Erica said. "Still gross. I can't believe I sat on it… what if it wasn't clean?" Stiles didn't dignify that question with an answer, so Erica decided to just move on instead.

She exited the room and moved to the other end of the hall. This room was bigger, with a king sized bed. The bed spread was red, trimmed with gold swirls that reminded Erica of the swirls on the title in her mother's kitchen. It was beautiful and inviting, and before Erica knew it, she had flung herself face-first into the mattress. It was soft, but it didn't swallow around her like the first bed did. It didn't squeak like the second one did (and was clean). This one was… "Perfect, I wish I could stay here forever."

"How did you get in here?" and "What even are you?" was screeched from the doorway behind her. Erica tensed her gears in the face of the unknown creatures that had just made their presence known. "Scott, wait for us in the kitchen, honey," the female-sounding voice ordered.

Erica rose from the bed and faced the two in the doorway. A man stood in a Sherriff's uniform, glaring at her. To his left was a slightly shorter woman, all of her dark curly hair pulled back into a ponytail. They were both frowning. As Erica flicked her gaze down, she saw that the man had his fingers curled around a gun at his belt. Precaution, she knew, even though that gun would do no more than put a gaping hole in the metal that she was made of.

"I am so sorry, I did not mean to intrude," she started to explain but she was cut off by a scoff from the man.

"The place is wired by a silent security system," he said. "Surely you would have disabled it if that was the case."

Erica groaned under her breath, "Stiles."

He sheepishly replied, "Sorry. Totally silent because I didn't even register it in the walls."

"Now," the sheriff continued in his gruff tone. "Tell me why I shouldn't just seize you and have you destroyed for breaking into my house."

Erica froze, ignoring all of the suggestions that Stiles was yelling in her brain. Humans were supposed to be truthful beings, right? Honesty was the best policy. And she had proof to her story, so they'd surely believe her, right? She pressed a button on her thigh that lowered the volume in which she heard Stiles, because he just wouldn't shut up. Then she looked up at the pair sheepishly.

"I, um, was exploring space and I saw your planet glowing so beautiful green-ish blue, and I just wanted to see it. I shouldn't have. I lost fuel and then your atmosphere sucked me in, like a magnetic pull—"

"Gravity," the female provided.

"—Yes, gravity. And so I was sucked in, and I must have been going too fast. I crash-landed on what seems to be your yard. I was confused, and Stiles—Oh, he's the computer that talks to me—" She was met with wide eyes and raised eyebrows, which was the norm when she told anyone about Stiles. "And he's this database that all robots are built with. But, anyway, he wanted to explore your house and find out all the knowledge that it held, and—yeah. I ended up trying your cereal, sitting in your living room, and trying out your beds. See, we float when we sleep back home and so we don't have beds… I was curious." It was all said in one breath, and oddly enough, Erica could have talked even longer, but she had run out of words. So the end just hung awkwardly in the air as the pair of humans tried to digest the information.

Then the man moved his wrist, Erica flinching because she thought he was going to whip out his gun. She was pleasantly surprised to find that the man had instead pulled out a black rectangle with a silver back. "An iPhone," Stiles whispered in her ear. She knew about those from one of the tangents that Stiles had gone on in the past.

He was going to call a firing squad, wasn't he? He was going to call men to come seize her and smash her into a million pieces of metal that they could then recycle, right?

She held her breath as she saw his thumb press the button at the bottom to wake it up. His thumb then swept across the screen as it came to life to unlock. He peered down at the screen for a few seconds that felt like an eternity, before passing the phone to the female. She studied it a little longer than the man had, then nodded her head before passing the phone back to the man. The man cleared his throat.

"You're telling the truth," he said gruffly. At her confused stare, he smiled slightly at her, raising the phone to face her. "Lie detector app. Scarily accurate."

Erica nodded slowly, still wary. "So, what are you going to do to me now?"

"Nothing," the female replied with a smile. "Now, I'm sure that pile of smoking metal used to be your ship?"

Erica nodded. "Yes, ma'am. Well, rocket, really."

"Well, you are going to stay in our house as a guest while you rebuild your rocket to go home."

"Seriously?" Erica questioned in shock.

"Why, yes. Well, that is if you tell us your name," the man prompted with a smile.

"Oh, sorry, sir. I am Erica, sir," she introduced herself.

"Well, I am John Stilinski, and this here is my wife Melissa." He wrapped his arm around her, the pair wearing matching friendly smiles.

"And our little boy downstairs is Scott. We also have a daughter away at college named Lydia," Melissa explained. "Now, let us go downstairs and see Scott. He's probably freaking out."

The trio began to descend the stairs. When they hit the landing, John turned towards Erica with a smirk. "So, you said you tried our cereal? Which one did you like best?"

Erica smiled shyly at the floor. If she was capable of human emotions she'd be blushing right now. "Um, I believe it was the Reese's."

"Ah, you and Scott have something in common, then," Melissa said happily. The trio made their way into the kitchen to greet Scott. He was sitting at the table, his tiny feet barely touching the ground. A mop of brown hair sat messily on top of his head. When his tiny head looked up at the sound of his name, he looked shocked at first. Then he was scurrying over on tiny legs to Erica.

"A real robot, Daddy? You got me a real robot!" he squealed happily and his parents just laughed. Erica stared at the little one, shocked by his energy and warmed by the happiness coming from him.

"Yes, baby," Melissa said, giggling. "Her rocket crashed and she's going to be staying with us for a while."

"Can we keep it?" the little boy asked, turning puppy dog eyes onto his parents.

"We'll see, son. She has her own family to return to." The sheriff patted the boy on his head. The boy sighed out an "okay," and then he was dragging Erica off to show her his toys, Stiles laughing so hard in her head.

It was going to be very hard to leave.


End file.
